Mailbox Monday

It's been a long time since I've read anything by Dennis Lehane. I loved his Kenzie-Gennaro series, although I wasn't too fond of the final installment (Moonlight Mile), which I read in 2010. I haven't tried any of his newer stand-alones and I still have Live by Night buried somewhere in a box of ARCs. Nonetheless, the ARC of World Gone By caught my eye when it came in the mail at work, so I decided to bring it home and add it to my hope-to-read-before-it-comes-out-in-paperback stack. Of course, having just now read the blurb, I realize that it's the third in the Coughlin series! I guess I need to decide if I should read this series out of order or start at the beginning with The Given Day. Any thoughts?

I loved Sara Gruen's Water for Elephants (also read five years ago) and, after reading the publisher's blurb on the back of the ARC, I knew it was something I'd enjoy. 

I hope to get At the Water's Edge read before it hits the shelves in June. We'll see about the Lehane book. It comes out in March.

Here are the publishers' blurbs for each novel:

World Gone By by Dennis Lehane

Dennis Lehane, the New York Times bestselling author of The Given Day and Live by Night, returns with a psychologically and morally complex novel of blood, crime, passion, and vengeance, set in Cuba and Ybor City, Florida, during World War II, in which Joe Coughlin must confront the cost of his criminal past and present.

Ten years have passed since Joe Coughlin’s enemies killed his wife and destroyed his empire, and much has changed. Prohibition is dead, the world is at war again, and Joe’s son, Tomás, is growing up. Now, the former crime kingpin works as a consigliore to the Bartolo crime family, traveling between Tampa and Cuba, his wife’s homeland.

A master who moves in and out of the black, white, and Cuban underworlds, Joe effortlessly mixes with Tampa’s social elite, U.S. Naval intelligence, the Lansky-Luciano mob, and the mob-financed government of Fulgencio Batista. He has everything—money, power, a beautiful mistress, and anonymity.

But success cannot protect him from the dark truth of his past—and ultimately, the wages of a lifetime of sin will finally be paid in full.

Dennis Lehane vividly recreates the rise of the mob during a world at war, from a masterfully choreographed Ash Wednesday gun battle in the streets of Ybor City to a chilling, heartbreaking climax in a Cuban sugar cane field. Told with verve and skill, World Gone By is a superb work of historical fiction from one of “the most interesting and accomplished American novelists” (Washington Post) writing today.

At the Water's Edge by Sara Gruen

In this new novel from the author of the #1 New York Times best seller Water for Elephants, Sara Gruen again demonstrates her talent for creating spellbinding period pieces. In At the Water’s Edge, she tells the gripping and poignant story of a privileged young woman’s moral and sexual awakening as she experiences the devastations of World War II in the Scottish Highlands.

Madeline Hyde, a young socialite from Philadelphia, reluctantly follows her husband and their best friend to the tiny village of Drumnadrochit in search of the Loch Ness monster—at the same time that a very real monster, Hitler, wages war against the Allied Forces. Despite German warplanes flying overhead and scarce food rations (and even scarcer stockings), what Maddie discovers—about the larger world and about herself—through the unlikely friendships she develops with the villagers, opens her eyes not only to the dark forces that exist around her but to the beauty and surprising possibilities as well.

What arrived in your mailbox this past week?